As it turns out, Bill isn’t the only one; they all bring booze.
Bill has bourbon, Beverly has vodka and a carton of orange juice, Richie a sixpack, Ben Hanscom a bottle of Wild Turkey. Mike has a sixpack in the little refrigerator in the staff lounge.
Eddie Kaspbrak comes in last, holding a small brown bag.
“What you got there, Eddie? ” Richie asks. “Za-Rex or Kool-Aid? ”
Smiling nervously, Eddie removes first a bottle of gin and then a bottle of prune juice.
In the thunderstruck silence which follows, Richie says quietly:
“Somebody call for the men in the white coats. Eddie Kaspbrak’s finally gone over the top. ”
“Gin-and-prune-juice happens to be very healthy, ” Eddie replies
defensively . . . and then they’re all laughing wildly, the sound of their mirth echoing and re-echoing in the silent library, rolling up and down the glassed-in hall between the adult library and the Children’s Library.
“You go head-on, ” Ben says, wiping his streaming eyes. “You go head- on, Eddie. I bet it really moves the mail, too. ”
Smiling, Eddie fills a paper cup three-quarters full of prune juice and then soberly adds two capfuls of gin.
“Oh Eddie, I do love you, ” Beverly says, and Eddie looks up, startled but smiling. She gazes up and down the table. “I love all of you. ”
Bill says, “W-We love you too, B-Bev. ”
“Yes, ” Ben says. “We love you. ” His eyes widen a little, and he laughs. “I think we still all love each other Do you know how rare that must
be? ”
There’s a moment of silence, and Mike is really not surprised to see that Richie is wearing his glasses.
“My contacts started to burn and I had to take them out, ” Richie says briefly when Mike asks. “Maybe we should get down to business? ”
They all look at Bill then, as they had in the gravel-pit, and Mike thinks: They look at Bill when they need a leader, at Eddie when they need a navigator. Get down to business, what a hell of a phrase that is. Do I tell them that the bodies of the children that were found back then and now weren’t sexually molested, not even precisely mutilated, but partially eaten?
Do I tell them I’ve got seven miner’s helmets, the kind with strong electric lights set into the front, stored back at my house, one of them for a guy named Stan Uris who couldn’t make the scene, as we used to say? Or is it maybe enough just to tell them to go home and get a good night’s sleep,
because it ends tomorrow or tomorrow night for good—either for It or us?
None of those things have to be said, perhaps, and the reason why they don’t has already been stated: they still love one another. Things have changed over the last twenty-seven years, but that, miraculously, hasn’t. It is, Mike thinks, our only real hope.
The only thing that really remains is to finish going through it, to
complete the job of catching up, of stapling past to present so that the strip of experience forms some half-assed kind of wheel. Yes, Mike thinks, that’s it. Tonight the job is to make the wheel; tomorrow we can see if it still turns
. . . the way it did when we drove the big kids out of the gravel-pit and out of the Barrens.
“Have you remembered the rest? ” Mike asks Richie.
Richie swallows some beer and shakes his head. “I remember you telling us about the bird . . . and about the smoke-hole.” A grin breaks over Richie’s face. “I remembered about that walking over here tonight with
Bevvie and Ben. What a fucking horror-show that was—” “Beep-beep, Richie, ” Beverly says, smiling.
“Well, you know, ” he says, still smiling himself and punching his glasses up on his nose in a gesture that is eerily reminiscent of the old Richie. He
winks at Mike. “You and me, right, Mikey? ” Mike snorts laughter and nods.
“Miss Scawlett! Miss Scawlett!” Richie shrieks in his Pickaninny Voice.
“It’s gettin a little wa’am in de smokehouse, Miss Scawlett!”
Laughing, Bill says, “Another engineering and architectural triumph by Ben Hanscom. ”
Beverly nods. “We were digging out the clubhouse when you brought your father’s photograph album to the Barrens, Mike. ”
“Oh, Christ!” Bill says, sitting suddenly bolt-upright. “And the pictures
—”
Richie nods grimly. “The same trick as in Georgie’s room. Only that time we all saw it. ”
Ben says, “I remembered what happened to the extra silver dollar. ” They all turn to look at him.
“I gave the other three to a friend of mine before I came out here, ” Ben says quietly. “For his kids. I remembered there had been a fourth, but I couldn’t remember what happened to it. Now I do. ” He looks at Bill. “We made a silver slug out of it, didn’t we? You, me, and Richie. At first we were going to make a silver bullet—”
“You were pretty sure you could do it, ” Richie agrees. “But in the end
—”
“We got c-cold fuh-feet. ” Bill nods slowly. The memory has fallen
naturally into its place, and he hears that same low but distinct click! when it happens. We’re getting closer, he thinks.
“We went back to Neibolt Street, ” Richie says. “All of us. ”
“You saved my life, Big Bill, ” Ben says suddenly and Bill shakes his head. “You did, though, ” Ben persists, and this time Bill doesn’t shake his head. He suspects that maybe he had done just that, although he does not yet remember how . . . and was it him? He thinks maybe Beverly . . . but that is not there. Not yet, anyway.
“Excuse me for a second, ” Mike says. “I’ve got a sixpack in the back fridge. ”
“Have one of mine, ” Richie says.
“Hanlon no drinkum white man’s beer, ” Mike replies. “Especially not yours, Trashmouth. ”
“Beep-beep, Mikey, ” Richie says solemnly, and Mike goes to get his beer on a warm wave of their laughter.
He snaps on the light in the lounge, a tacky little room with seedy chairs, a Silex badly in need of scrubbing, and a bulletin board covered with old notices, wage and hour information, and a few New Yorker cartoons now
turning yellow and curling up at the edges. He opens the little refrigerator and feels the shock sink into him, bone-deep and ice-white, the way
February cold sank into you when February was here and it seemed that April never would be. Blue and orange balloons drift out in a flood, dozens of them, a New Year’s Eve bouquet of party-balloons, and he thinks
incoherently in the midst of his fear, All we need is Guy Lombardo tootling away on “Auld Lang Syne. ” They waft past his face and rise toward the
lounge ceiling. He’s trying to scream, unable to scream, seeing what had been behind the balloons, what It had popped into the refrigerator beside his beer, as if for a late-night snack after his worthless friends have all told
their worthless stories and gone back to their rented beds in this home town that is no longer home.
Mike takes a step backward, his hands going to his face, shutting the vision out. He stumbles over one of the chairs, almost falls, and takes his
hands away. It is still there; Stan Uris’s severed head beside Mike’s sixpack of Bud Light, the head not of a man but of an eleven-year-old boy. The mouth is open in a soundless scream but Mike can see neither teeth nor
tongue because the mouth has been stuffed full of feathers. The feathers are a light brown and unspeakably huge. He knows well enough what bird those feathers came from. Oh yes. Oh yes indeed. He had seen the bird in May of 1958 and they had all seen it in early August of 1958 and then, years later, while visiting his dying father, he had found out that Will Hanlon had seen it once, too, after his escape from the fire at the Black Spot. The blood from Stan’s tattered neck has dripped down and formed a coagulated pool on the fridge’s bottom shelf. It glitters dark ruby-red in the uncompromising glow shed by the fridge bulb.
“Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . ” Mike manages, but no more sound than that can he make. Then the head opens its eyes, and they are the silver-bright eyes of Pennywise the Clown. Those eyes roll in his direction and the head’s lips begin to squirm around the mouthful of feathers. It is trying to speak,
perhaps trying to deliver prophecy like the oracle in a Greek play.
Just thought I’d join you, Mike, because you can’t win without me. You can’t win without me and you know it, don’t you? You might have had a
chance if all of me had shown up, but I just couldn’t stand the strain on my all-American brain, if you see what I mean, jellybean. All the six of you can do on your own is hash over some old times and then get yourselves killed.
So I thought I’d head you off at the pass. Head you off, get it, Mikey? Get it, old pal? Get it, you fucking scumbag nigger?
You’re not real! he screams, but no sound comes out; he is like a TV with the volume control turned all the way down.
Incredibly, grotesquely, the head winks at him.
I’m real, all right. Real as raindrops. And you know what I’m talking about, Mikey. What the six of you are planning to try is like taking off in a jet plane with no landing gear. There’s no sense in going up if you can’t get back down, is there? No sense in going down if you can’t get back up, either. You’ll never think of the right riddles and jokes. You’ll never make me laugh, Mikey. You’ve all forgotten how to turn your screams upside- down. Beep-beep, Mikey, what do you say? Remember the bird? Nothing but a sparrow, but say-hey! it was a lulu, wasn’t it? Big as a barn, big as one of those silly Japanese movie monsters that used to scare you when you
were a little kid. The days when you knew how to turn that bird from your door are gone forever. Believe it, Mikey. If you know how to use your head, you’ll get out of here, out of Derry, right now. If you don’t know how to use it, it’ll end up just like this one here. Today’s guidepost along the great road of life is use it before you lose it, my good man.
The head rolls over on its face (the feathers in its mouth make a horrid crumpling sound) and falls out of the refrigerator. It thuks to the floor and rolls toward him like a hideous bowling ball, its blood-matted hair changing places with its grinning face; it rolls toward him leaving a gluey trail of blood and dismembered bits of feather behind, its mouth working around its clot of feathers.
Beep-beep, Mikey! it screams as Mike backs madly away from it, hands held out in a warding-off gesture. Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-fucking- beep!
Then there is a sudden loud pop—the sound of a plastic cork thumbed out of a bottle of cheap champagne. The head disappears (Real, Mike thinks sickly; there was nothing supernatural about that pop, anyway; that was the sound of air rushing back into a suddenly vacated space . . . real, oh God, real). A thin net of blood droplets floats up and then patters back down. No need to clean the lounge, though; Carole will see nothing when she comes in tomorrow, not even if she has to plow her way through the balloons to get
to the hotplate and make her first cup of coffee. How handy. He giggles shrilly.
He looks up and yes, the balloons are still there. The blue ones say: DERRY NIGGERS GET THE BIRD. The orange ones say: THE LOSERS ARE STILL LOSING, BUT STANLEY URIS IS FINALLY AHEAD.
No sense going up if you can’t get back down, the speaking head had assured him, no sense going down if you can’t get back up. This latter makes him think again of the stored miner’s helmets. And was it true?
Suddenly he’s thinking about the first day he went down to the Barrens after the rockfight. July 6th, that had been, two days after he had marched in the Fourth of July parade . . . two days after he had seen Pennywise the Clown in person for the first time. It had been after that day in the Barrens, after listening to their stories and then, hesitantly, telling his own, that he had
gone home and asked his father if he could look at his photograph album.
Why exactly had he gone down to the Barrens that July 6th? Had he known he would find them there? It seemed that he had—and not just that they would be there, but where they would be. They had been talking about
a clubhouse of some sort, he remembers, but it had seemed to him that they had been talking about that because there was something else that they didn’t know how to talk about.
Mike looks up at the balloons, not really seeing them now, trying to remember exactly how it had been that day, that hot hot day. Suddenly it seems very important to remember just what had happened, what every nuance had been, what his state of mind had been.
Because that was when everything began to happen. Before that the
others had talked about killing It, but there had been no forward motion, no plan. When Mike had come the circle closed, the wheel began to roll. It had been later that same day that Bill and Richie and Ben went down to the
library and began to do serious research on an idea that Bill had had a day or a week or a month before. It had all begun to—
“Mike? ” Richie calls from the Reference Room where the others are gathered. “Did you die in there? ”
Almost, Mike thinks, looking at the balloons, the blood, the feathers inside the fridge.
He calls back: “I think you guys better come in here. ”
He hears the scrape of their chairs, the mutter of their voices; he hears Richie saying “Oh Jesus, what’s up now? ” and another ear, this one in his memory, hears Richie saying something else, and suddenly he remembers what it is he has been searching for; even more, he understands why it has seemed so elusive. The reaction of the others when he stepped into the clearing in the darkest, deepest, and most overgrown part of the Barrens that day had been . . . nothing. No surprise, no questions about how he had found them, no big deal. Ben had been eating a Twinkie, he remembers,
Beverly and Richie had been smoking cigarettes, Bill had been lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking at the sky, Eddie and Stan
were looking doubtfully at a series of strings which had been pegged into the ground to form a square of about five feet on a side.
No surprise, no questions, no big deal. He had simply shown up and been accepted. It was as if, without even knowing it, they had been waiting for him. And in that third ear, memory’s ear, he hears Richie’s Pickaninny Voice raised as it was earlier tonight: “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, here come
2
that black chile agin! Lawks-a-mussy, I doan know what thisyere Barrens is comin to! Look at that there nappy haid, Big Bill!” Bill didn’t even look around; he just went on staring dreamily at the fat summer clouds marching across the sky. He was giving an important question his most careful consideration. Richie was not offended by the lack of attention, however.
He pushed onward. ”Jest lookin at that nappy haid makes me b’leeve I needs me another mint joolip! I’se gwinter have it out on the verandah, where it’s be a little bit coolah—”
“Beep-beep, Richie, ” Ben said from around a mouthful of Twinkie, and Beverly laughed.
“Hi, ” Mike said uncertainly. His heart was beating a little too hard, but he was determined to go on with this. He owed his thanks, and his father had told him that you always paid what you owed—and as quick as you could, before the interest mounted up.
Stan looked around. “Hi, ” he said, and then looked back at the square of strings pegged into the center of the clearing. “Ben, are you sure this is going to work? ”
“It’ll work, ” Ben said. “Hi, Mike. ”
“Want a cigarette? ” Beverly asked. “I got two left. ”
“No thank you. ” Mike took a deep breath and said, “I wanted to thank you all again for helping me the other day. Those guys meant to hurt me bad. I’m sorry some of you guys got banged up. ”
Bill waved his hand, dismissing it. “D-D-Don’t wuh-wuh-horry a-a-bout it. Th-they’ve h-had it i-i-in f-for us all y-y-year.” He sat up and looked at Mike with sudden starry interest. “C-Can I a-ask you s-s-something? ”
“I guess so, ” Mike said. He sat down gingerly. He had heard such
prefaces before. The Denbrough kid was going to ask him what it was like to be a Negro.
But instead Bill said: “When L-L-Larsen pitched the n-no-h-hitter in the World S-Series two years ago, d-do you think that was just luh-luck? ”
Richie dragged deep on his cigarette and started to cough. Beverly pounded him good-naturedly on the back. “You’re just a beginner, Richie, you’ll learn. ”
“I think it’s gonna fall in, Ben, ” Eddie said worriedly, looking at the pegged square. “I don’t know how cool I am on the idea of getting buried alive. ”
“You’re not gonna get buried alive, ” Ben said. “And if you are, just suck your damn old aspirator until someone pulls you out. ”
This struck Stanley Uris as deliciously funny. He leaned back on his elbow, his head turned up to the sky, and laughed until Eddie kicked his shin and told him to shut up.
“Luck, ” Mike said finally. “I think any no-hitter’s more luck than skill. ” “M-M-Me t-too, ” Bill said. Mike waited to see if there was more, but
Bill seemed satisfied. He lay down again, laced his hands behind his head again, and went back to studying the clouds as they floated by.
“What are you guys up to? ” Mike asked, looking at the square of strings pegged just above the ground.
“Oh, this is Haystack’s big idea of the week, ” Richie said. “Last time he flooded out the Barrens and that was pretty good, but this one’s a real dinner-winner. This is Dig Your Own Clubhouse Month. Next month—”
“Y-You don’t nuh-nuh-need to put B-B-B-Ben d-duh-hown,” Bill said, still looking at the sky. “It’s going to be guh-guh-good. ”
“God’s sake, Bill, I was just kidding. ”
“Suh-Sometimes you k-k-kid too much, Rih-Richie. ” Richie accepted the rebuke silently.
“I still don’t get it, ” Mike said.
“Well, it’s pretty simple, ” Ben said. “They wanted a treehouse, and we could do that, but people have a bad habit of breaking their bones when they fall out of tree-houses—”
“Kookie . . . Kookie . . . lend me your bones, ” Stan said, and laughed again while the others looked at him, puzzled. Stan did not have much sense of humor, and the bit he did have was sort of peculiar.
“You ees goin loco, senhorr, ” Richie said. “Eees the heat an the
cucarachas, I theenk. ”
“Anyway, ” Ben said, “what we’ll do is dig down about five feet in the square I pegged out there. We can’t go much deeper than that or we’ll hit groundwater, I guess. It’s pretty close to the surface down here. Then we’ll shore up the sides just to make sure they don’t cave in. ” He looked significantly at Eddie here, but Eddie was worried.
“Then what? ” Mike asked, interested. “We’ll cap off the top. ”
“Huh? ”
“Put boards over the top of the hole. We can put in a trapdoor or something so we can get in and out, even windows if we want—”
“We’ll need some hih-hih-hinges, ” Bill said, still looking at the clouds. “We can get those at Reynolds Hardware, ” Ben said.
“Y-You guh-guh-guys have your a-a-allowances, ” Bill said.
“I’ve got five dollars, ” Beverly said. “I saved it up from babysitting. ”
Richie immediately began to crawl toward her on his hands and knees. “I love you, Bevvie, ” he said, making dog’s eyes at her. “Will you marry me? We’ll live in a pine-studded bungalow—”
“A what? ” Beverly asked, while Ben watched them with an odd mixture of anxiety, amusement, and concentration.
“A bung-studded pinealow, ” Richie said. “Five bucks is enough, sweetie, you and me and baby makes three—”
Beverly laughed and blushed and moved away from him. “We sh-share the e-expenses, ” Bill said. “That’s why we got a club. ”
“So after we cap the hole with boards, ” Ben went on, “we put down this heavy-duty glue—Tangle—Track, they call it—and put the sods back on.
Maybe sprinkle it with pine needles. We could be down there and people— people like Henry Bowers—could walk right over us and not even know we were there. ”
“You thought of that? ” Mike said. “Jeez, that’s great!” Ben smiled. It was his turn to blush.
Bill sat up suddenly and looked at Mike. “You w-w-want to heh-help? ” “Well . . . sure, ” Mike said. “That’d be fun. ”
A look passed among the others—Mike felt it as well as saw it. There are seven of us here, Mike thought, and for no reason at all he shivered.
“When are you going to break ground? ”
“P-P-hretty s-soon, ” Bill said, and Mike knew—knew—that it wasn’t just Ben’s underground clubhouse Bill was talking about. Ben knew it, too. So did Richie, Beverly, and Eddie. Stan Uris had stopped smiling. “W-We’re g- gonna start this pruh-huh-hoject pretty suh-suh-soon. ”
There was a pause then, and Mike was suddenly aware of two things: they wanted to say something, tell him something . . . and he was not entirely sure he wanted to hear it. Ben had picked up a stick and was doodling aimlessly in the dirt, his hair hiding his face. Richie was gnawing at his already ragged fingernails. Only Bill was looking directly at Mike.
“Is something wrong? ” Mike asked uneasily.
Speaking very slowly, Bill said: “W-W-We’re a cluh-club. Y-You can be in the club if you w-w-want, but y-y-you have to kee-keep our see-see- secrets.
“You mean, like the clubhouse? ” Mike asked, now more uneasy than ever. “Well, sure—”
“We’ve got another secret, kid, ” Richie said, still not looking at Mike. “And Big Bill says we’ve got something more important to do this summer than digging underground clubhouses. ”
“He’s right, too, ” Ben added.
There was a sudden, whistling gasp. Mike jumped. It was only Eddie, blasting off. Eddie looked at Mike apologetically, shrugged, and then nodded.
“Well, ” Mike said finally, “don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me. ”
Bill was looking at the others. “I-Is there a-a-anyone who d-doesn’t want him in the cluh-club? ”
No one spoke or raised a hand.
“W-Who wants to t-tell? ” Bill asked.
There was another long pause, and this time Bill didn’t break it. At last Beverly sighed and looked up at Mike.
“The kids who have been killed, ” she said. “We know who’s been doing it, and it’s not human. ”
3
They told him, one by one: the clown on the ice, the leper under the porch, the blood and voices from the drain, the dead boys in the Standpipe. Richie
told about what had happened when he and Bill went back to Neibolt Street, and Bill spoke last, telling about the school photo that had moved, and the
picture he had stuck his hand into. He finished by explaining that it had killed his brother Georgie, and that the Losers’ Club was dedicated to killing the monster . . . whatever the monster really was.
Mike thought later, going home that night, that he should have listened with disbelief mounting into horror and finally run away as fast as he could, not looking back, convinced either that he was being put on by a bunch of white kids who didn’t like black folks or that he was in the presence of six authentic lunatics who had in some way caught their lunacy from each other, the way everyone in the same class could catch a particularly virulent cold.
But he didn’t run, because in spite of the horror, he felt a strange sense of comfort. Comfort and something else, something more elemental: a feeling of coming home. There are seven of us here, he thought again as Bill finally finished speaking.
He opened his mouth, not sure of what he was going to say. “I’ve seen the clown, ” he said.
“What? ” Richie and Stan asked together, and Beverly turned her head so quickly that her pony-tail flipped from her left shoulder to her right.
“I saw him on the Fourth, ” Mike said slowly, speaking to Bill mostly.
Bill’s eyes, sharp and utterly concentrated, were on his, demanding that he go on. “Yes, on the Fourth of July . . . ” He trailed off momentarily, thinking: But I knew him. I knew him because that wasn’t the first time I
saw him. And it wasn’t the first time I saw something . . . something wrong.
He thought of the bird then, the first time he’d really allowed himself to think of it—except in nightmares—since May. He had thought he was going crazy. It was a relief to find out he wasn’t crazy . . . but it was still a scary relief. He wet his lips.
“Go on, ” Bev said impatiently. “Hurry up. ” “Well, the thing is, I was in the parade. I—”
“I saw you, ” Eddie said. “You were playing the saxophone.”
“Well, it’s actually a trombone, ” Mike said. “I play with the Neibolt Church School Band. Anyway, I saw the clown. He was handing out
balloons to kids on the three-way corner downtown. He was just like Ben and Bill said. Silver suit, orange buttons, white makeup on his face, big red smile. I don’t know if it was lipstick or makeup, but it looked like blood. ”
The others were nodding, excited now, but Bill only went on looking at Mike closely. “O-O-Orange tufts of h-h-hair?” he asked Mike, making them unconsciously over his own head with his fingers.
Mike nodded.
“Seeing him like that . . . it scared me. And while I was looking at him, he turned around and waved at me, like he’d read my mind, or my feelings, or whatever you call it. And that . . . like, scared me worse. I didn’t know why then, but he scared me so bad for a couple of seconds I couldn’t play my ’bone anymore. All the spit in my mouth dried up and I felt . . . ” He glanced briefly at Beverly. He remembered it all so clearly now, how the sun had suddenly seemed intolerably dazzling on the brass of his horn and the chrome of the cars, the music too loud, the sky too blue. The clown had
raised one white-gloved hand (the other was full of balloon strings) and had waved slowly back and forth, his bloody grin too red and too wide, a scream turned upside-down. He remembered how the flesh of his testicles had begun to crawl, how his bowels had suddenly felt all loose and hot, as if he might suddenly drop a casual load of shit into his pants. But he couldn’t say any of that in front of Beverly. You didn’t say stuff like that in front of girls, even if they were the sort of girls you could say things like “bitch”
and “bastard” in front of. “. . . I felt scared, ” he finished, feeling that was too weak, but not knowing how to say the rest. But they were nodding as if they understood, and he felt an indescribable relief wash through him.
Somehow that clown looking at him, smiling his red smile, his white- gloved hand penduluming slowly back and forth . . . that had been worse than having Henry Bowers and the rest after him. Ever so much worse.
“Then we were past, ” Mike went on. “We marched up Main Street Hill.
And I saw him again, handing out balloons to kids. Except a lot of them didn’t want to take them. Some of the little ones were crying. I couldn’t figure out how he could have gotten up there so fast. I thought to myself
that there must be two of them, you know, both of them dressed the same way. A team. But then he turned around and waved to me again and I knew it was him. It was the same man. ”
“He’s not a man, ” Richie said, and Beverly shuddered. Bill put his arm around her for a moment and she looked at him gratefully.
“He waved to me . . . and then he winked. Like we had a secret. Or like .
. . like maybe he knew I’d recognized him. ”
Bill dropped his arm from Beverly’s shoulders. “You reh-reh-reh- recognized him? ”
“I think so, ” Mike said. “I have to check something before I say it’s for sure. My father’s got some pictures. . . . He collects them. Listen, you
guys play down here a lot, don’t you? ”
“Sure, ” Ben said. “That’s why we’re building a clubhouse. ”
Mike nodded. “I’ll check and see if I’m right. If I am, I can bring the pictures. ”
“O-O-Old pic-pictures? ” Bill asked. “Yes. ”
“W-W-What else? ” Bill asked.
Mike opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked around at them uncertainly and then said, “You’d think I was crazy. Crazy or lying. ”
“D-Do y-y-you th-think we’re cruh-cruh-crazy? ” Mike shook his head.
“You bet we’re not, ” Eddie said. “I got a lot wrong with me, but I’m not bughouse. I don’t think. ”
“No, ” Mike said. “I don’t think you’re crazy. ”
“Well, we-we won’t th-think you’re cruh-cruh . . . nuts, e-e-either, ” Bill said.
Mike looked them all over, cleared his throat, and said: “I saw a bird.
Couple, three months ago. I saw a bird. ”
Stan Uris looked at Mike. “What kind of a bird? ”
Speaking more reluctantly than ever Mike said: “It looked like a sparrow, sort of, but it also looked like a robin. It had an orange chest. ”
“Well, what’s so special about a bird? ” Ben asked. “There are lots of birds in Derry. ” But he felt uneasy, and looking at Stan, he felt sure that Stan was remembering what had happened in the Standpipe, and how he had somehow stopped it from happening by shouting out the names of birds. But he forgot all about that and everything else when Mike spoke again.
“This bird was bigger than a housetrailer, ” he said.
He looked at their shocked, amazed faces. He waited for their laughter, but none came. Stan looked as if someone had clipped him with a brick. His face had gone so pale it was the color of muted November sunlight.
“I swear it’s true, ” Mike said. “It was a giant bird, like one of those birds in the monster-movies that are supposed to be prehistoric. ”
“Yeah, like in The Giant Claw, ” Richie said. He thought the bird in that had been sort of fake-looking, but by the time it got to New York he had still been excited enough to spill his popcorn over the balcony railing at the Aladdin. Foxy Foxworth would have kicked him out, but the movie was over by then anyway. Sometimes you got the shit kicked out of you, but as Big Bill said, sometimes you won one, too.
“But it didn’t look prehistoric, ” Mike said. “And it didn’t look like one of those whatdoyoucallums the Greeks and Romans made up stories about
—”
“Ruh-Ruh-Rocs? ” Bill suggested.
“Right, I guess so. It wasn’t like those, either. It was just like a combination robin and sparrow. The two most common birds you see. ” He laughed a little wildly.
“W-W-Where—” Bill began.
“Tell us, ” Beverly said simply, and after a moment to collect his thoughts, Mike did. And telling it, watching their faces grow concerned and scared but not disbelieving or derisive, he felt an incredible weight lift from
his chest. Like Ben with his mummy or Eddie with his leper and Stan with the drowned boys, he had seen a thing that would have driven an adult insane, not just with terror but with the walloping force of an unreality too great to be explained away or, lacking any rational explanation, simply ignored. Elijah’s face had been burned black by the light of God’s love, or so Mike had read; but Elijah had been an old man when it happened, and maybe that made a difference. Hadn’t one of those other Bible fellows, this one little more than a kid, actually wrestled an angel to a draw?
He had seen it and he had gone on with his life; he had integrated the memory into his view of the world. He was still young enough so that view was tremendously wide. But what had happened that day had nonetheless haunted his mind’s darker corners, and sometimes in his dreams he ran from that grotesque bird as it printed its shadow on him from above. Some of
these dreams he remembered and some he did not, but they were there, shadows which moved by themselves.
How little of it he had forgotten and how greatly it had troubled him (as he went about his daily round: helping his father, going to school, riding his bike, doing errands for his mother, waiting for the black groups to come on American Bandstand after school) was perhaps measurable in only one way
—the relief he felt in sharing it with the others. As he did, he realized it was the first time he had even allowed himself to think of it fully since that early morning by the Canal, when he had seen those odd grooves . . . and the blood.
4
Mike told the story of the bird at the old Ironworks and how he had run into the pipe to escape it. Later on that afternoon, three of the Losers—Ben, Richie, Bill—walked toward the Derry Public Library. Ben and Richie were keeping a close watch for Bowers and Company, but Bill only looked at the sidewalk, frowning, lost in thought. About an hour after telling them his story Mike had left them, saying his father wanted him home by four to pick peas. Beverly had to do some marketing and fix dinner for her father,
she said. Both Eddie and Stan had their own things to do. But before they
broke up for the day they began digging what was to become—if Ben was right—their underground clubhouse. To Bill (and to all of them, he suspected), the ground-breaking had seemed an almost symbolic act. They had begun. Whatever it was they were supposed to do as a group, as a unit, they had begun.
Ben asked Bill if he believed Mike Hanlon’s story. They were passing Derry Community House and the library was just ahead, a stone oblong comfortably shaded by elms a century old and as yet untouched by the Dutch Elm disease that would later plague and thin them.
“Yeah, ” Bill said. “I th-think it was the truh-hooth. C-C-Crazy, but true.
What about you, Ruh-Ruh-Richie? ”
Richie nodded. “Yeah. I hate to believe it, if you know what I mean, but I guess I do. You remember what he said about the bird’s tongue? ”
Bill and Ben nodded. Orange fluffs on it.
“That’s the kicker, ” Richie said. “It’s like some comic-book villain. Lex Luthor or the Joker or someone like that. It always leaves a trademark. ”
Bill nodded thoughtfully. It was like some comic-book villain. Because they saw it that way? Thought of it that way? Yes, perhaps so. It was kid’s stuff, but it seemed that was what this thing thrived on—kid’s stuff.
They crossed the street to the library side.
“I a-a-asked Stuh-Stuh-Stan i-if he e-ever h-h-heard of a buh-bird I-like that, ” Bill said. “Nuh-nuh-not n-necessarily a b-b-big wuh-wuh-one, but j- just a-a-a—”
“A real one? ” Richie suggested.
Bill nodded. “H-He suh-said there m-m-might be a buh-bird like that in Suh-houth America or A-A-A-Africa, but nuh-nuh-not a-around h-h-here. ”
“He didn’t believe it, then? ” Ben asked.
“H-H-He buh-believed i-i-it, ” Bill said. And then he told them something else Stan had suggested when Bill walked with him back to
where Stan had left his bike. Stan’s idea was that nobody else could have seen that bird before Mike told them that story. Something else, maybe, but not that bird, because the bird was Mike Hanlon’s personal monster. But
now . . . why, now that bird was the property of the whole Losers’ Club, wasn’t it? Any of them might see it. It might not look exactly the same; Bill might see it as a crow, Richie as a hawk, Beverly as a golden eagle, for all Stan knew—but It could be a bird to all of them now. Bill told Stan that if
that was true, then any of them might see the leper, the mummy, or possibly the dead boys.
“Which means we ought to do something pretty soon if we’re going to do anything at all, ” Stan had replied. “It knows . . . ”
“Wuh-What? ” Bill had asked sharply. “Eh-Everything we nuh-know? ” “Man, if It knows that, we’re sunk, ” Stan had answered. “But you can
bet It knows we know about It. I think It’ll try to get us. Are you still thinking about what we talked about yesterday? ”
“Yes. ”
“I wish I could go with you. ”
“Buh-Buh-Ben and Rih-Richie w-w-will. Ben’s really s-s-smart, and Rih- Rih-Richie is, too, when he ih-isn’t fucking o-off. ”
Now, standing outside the library, Richie asked Bill exactly what it was he had in mind. Bill told them, speaking slowly so he wouldn’t stutter too badly. The idea had been circling in his mind for the last two weeks, but it had taken Mike’s story of the bird to crystallize it.
What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a bird? Well, shooting it was pretty goddam final.
What did you do if you wanted to get rid of a monster?
Well, the movies suggested that shooting it with a silver bullet was pretty goddam final.
Ben and Richie listened to this respectfully enough. Then Richie asked, “How do you get a silver bullet, Big Bill? Send away for it? ”
“Very fuh-fuh-funny. We’ll have to m-m-make it. ” “How? ”
“I guess that’s what we’re at the library to find out, ” Ben said.
Richie nodded and pushed his glasses up on his nose. Behind them, his eyes were sharp and thoughtful . . . but doubtful, Bill thought. He felt doubtful himself. At least there was no foolishness in Richie’s eyes, and that was a step in the right direction.
“You thinking about your dad’s Walther? ” Richie asked. “The one we took to Neibolt Street? ”
“Yes, ” Bill said.
“Even if we could really make silver bullets, ” Richie said, “where would we get the silver? ”
“Let me worry about that, ” Ben said quietly.
“Well . . . okay, ” Richie said. “We’ll let Haystack worry about that. Then what? Neibolt Street again? ”
Bill nodded. “Nee-Nee-Neibolt Street a-a-again. And then we buh-blow its fucking h-h-head o-off. ”
The three of them stood there a moment longer, looking at each other solemnly, and then they went into the library.
5
“Sure an begorrah, it’s that black feller again!” Richie cried in his Irish Cop Voice.
A week had passed; it was nearly mid-July and the underground clubhouse was almost finished.
“Top o the mornin to ye, Mr. O’Hanlon, sor! And a foine, foine day it promises to be, foine as pertaters a-growin, as me old mither used to—” “So far as I know, noon is the top of the morning, Richie, ” Ben said,
popping up in the hole, “and noon was two hours ago. ” He and Richie had been putting in shoring around the sides of the hole. Ben had taken off his sweatshirt because the day was hot and the work was hard. His tee-shirt was gray with sweat and stuck to his chest and pouch of a stomach. He seemed remarkably unselfconscious of the way he looked, but Mike guessed that if Ben heard Beverly coming, he would be inside that baggy sweatshirt again before you could say puppy love.
“Don’t be so picky—you sound like Stan the Man, ” Richie said. He had gotten out of the hole five minutes before because, he told Ben, it was time for a cigarette break.
“I thought you said you didn’t have any cigarettes, ” Ben had said. “I don’t, ” Richie had replied, “but the principle remains the same. ”
Mike had his father’s photograph album under his arm. “Where is
everybody? ” he asked. He knew Bill had to be somewhere around, because he had left his own bike parked under the bridge near Silver.
“Bill and Eddie went down to the dump about half an hour ago to liberate some more boards, ” Richie said. “Stanny and Bev went down to Reynolds Hardware to get hinges. I don’t know what the frock Haystack’s up to down
there—up to down there, ha-ha, you get it?—but it’s probably no good. Boy needs someone to keep an eye on him, you know. By the way, you owe us
twenty-three cents if you still want to be in this club. Your share of the hinges. ”
Mike switched the album from his right arm to his left and dug into his pocket. He counted out twenty-three cents (leaving a grand total of one
dime in his own personal treasury) and handed it over to Richie. Then he walked over to the hole and looked in.
Except it really wasn’t a hole anymore. The sides had been neatly squared off. Each side had been shored up. The boards were all mongrels, but Ben, Bill, and Stan had done a good job of sizing them with tools from Zack Denbrough’s shop (and Bill had been at great pains to make sure every tool was returned every night, and in the same condition as when it was taken). Ben and Beverly had nailed cross-pieces between the supports.
The hole still made Eddie a little nervous, but that was Eddie’s nature. Piled carefully to one side were squares of sod which would later be glued to the top.
“I think you guys know what you’re doing, ” Mike said. “Sure, ” Ben said, and pointed to the album. “What you got? ”
“My father’s Derry album, ” Mike said. “He collects old pictures and
clippings about the town. It’s his hobby. I was looking through it a couple of days ago—I told you I thought I’d seen that clown before. And I did. In here. So I brought it down. ” He was too ashamed to add that he had not dared to ask his father’s permission to do this. Afraid of the questions to which such a request might lead, he had taken it from the house like a thief while his father planted potatoes in the west field and his mother hung
clothes in the back yard. “I thought you guys ought to take a look, too. ” “Well, let’s see, ” Richie said.
“I’d like to wait until everybody’s here. It might be better. ”
“Okay. ” Richie was, in truth, not that anxious to look at more pictures of Derry, in this or any other album. Not after what had happened in Georgie’s room. “You want to help me and Ben with the rest of the shoring? ”
“You bet. ” Mike put his father’s album down carefully, far enough from the hole so it wouldn’t be pelted with flying dirt, and took Ben’s shovel.
“Dig right here, ” Ben said, showing Mike the spot. “Go down about a foot. Then I’ll set a board in and hold it flush against the side while you
shovel the dirt back in. ”
“Good plan, man, ” Richie said sagely from where he sat on the edge of the excavation with his sneakers dangling down.
“What’s wrong with you? ” Mike asked.
“Got a bone in my leg, ” Richie said comfortably.
“How’s your project with Bill going? ” Mike stopped long enough to strip off his shirt and then began to dig. It was hot down here, even in the Barrens. Crickets hummed sleepily like summer clocks in the brush.
“Well . . . not too bad, ” Richie said, and Mike thought he flashed Ben a mildly warning look. “I guess. ”
“Why don’t you play your radio, Richie? ” Ben asked. He slipped a board into the hole Mike had dug and held it there. Richie’s transistor was hung by the strap in its accustomed place, on the thick branch of a nearby shrub.
“Batteries are worn out, ” Richie said. “You had to have my last twenty- five cents for hinges, remember? Cruel, Haystack, very cruel. After all the
things I’ve done for you. Besides, all I can get down here is WABI and they only play pansy rock. ”
“Huh? ” Mike asked.
“Haystack thinks Tommy Sands and Pat Boone sing rock and roll, ”
Richie said, “but that’s because he’s ill. Elvis sings rock and roll. Ernie K. Doe sings rock and roll. Carl Perkins sings rock and roll. Bobby Darin.
Buddy Holly. ‘Ah-ow Peggy . . . my Peggy Suh-uh-oo . . . ”’
“Please, Richie, ” Ben said.
“Also, ” Mike said, leaning on his shovel, “there’s Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Shep and the Limelights, LaVerne Baker, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Coasters, the Isley Brothers, the Crests, the Chords, Stick McGhee—”
They were looking at him with such amazement that Mike laughed.
“You lost me after Little Richard, ” Richie said. He liked Little Richard, but if he had a secret rock-and-roll hero that summer it was Jerry Lee Lewis. His mom had happened to come into the living room while Jerry
Lee was performing on American Bandstand. This was at the point in his act where Jerry Lee actually climbed onto his piano and played it upside down with his hair hanging in his face. He had been singing “High School Confidential. ” For a moment Richie believed his mom was going to faint. She didn’t, but she was so traumatized by what she had seen that she talked
at dinner that night about sending Richie to one of those military-type
camps for the rest of the summer. Now Richie shook his hair down over his eyes and began to sing: “Come on over baby all the cats are at the high school rockin—”
Ben began to stagger around the hole, grasping his large belly and pretending to puke. Mike held his nose, but he was laughing so hard tears squirted out of his eyes.
“What’s wrong? ” Richie demanded. “I mean, what ails you guys? That was good! I mean, that was really good!”
“Oh man, ” Mike said, and now he was laughing so hard he could barely talk. “That was priceless. I mean, that was really priceless. ”
“Negroes have no taste, ” Richie said. “I think it even says so in the Bible. ”
“Yo mamma, ” Mike said, laughing harder than ever. When Richie asked, with honest bewilderment, what that meant, Mike sat down with a thump and rocked back and forth, howling and holding his stomach.
“You probably think I’m jealous, ” Richie said. “You probably think I
want to be a Negro. ”
Now Ben also fell down, laughing wildly. His whole body rippled and quaked alarmingly. His eyes bulged. “No more, Richie, ” he managed. “I’m gonna shit my pants. I’m gonna d-d-die if you don’t stub-stop—”
“I don’t want to be a Negro, ” Richie said. “Who wants to wear pink
pants and live in Boston and buy pizza by the slice? I want to be Jewish like Stan. I want to own a pawnshop and sell people switchblades and plastic
dog-puke and used guitars. ”
Ben and Mike were now actually screaming with laughter. Their laughter echoed through the green and jungly ravine that was the misnamed Barrens, causing birds to take wing and squirrels to freeze momentarily on limbs. It was a young sound, penetrating, lively, vital, unsophisticated, free. Almost every living thing within range of that sound reacted to it in some way, but
the thing which had tumbled out of a wide concrete drain and into the upper Kenduskeag was not living. The previous afternoon there had been a sudden driving thunderstorm (the clubhouse-to-be had not been much
affected—since digging operations had begun, Ben had covered the hole carefully each evening with a ragged piece of tarpaulin Eddie had scrounged from behind Wally’s Spa; it smelled painty but it did the job),
and the stormdrains under Derry had run with violent water for two or three hours. It was that spate of water that had pushed this unpleasant baggage into the sun for the flies to find.
It was the body of a nine-year-old named Jimmy Cullum. Except for the nose, his face was gone. There was a churned and featureless mess where it had been. This raw meat was dotted with deep black marks that perhaps only Stan Uris would have recognized for what they were: pecks. Pecks
made by a very large beak.
Water rilled over Jimmy Cullum’s muddy chino pants. His white hands floated like dead fish. They had also been pecked, although not as badly. His paisley shirt ballooned out and collapsed back, ballooned out and collapsed back, like a bladder.
Bill and Eddie, loaded down with boards scrounged from the dump, crossed the Kenduskeag by stepping-stones less than forty yards from the body. They heard Richie, Ben, and Mike laughing, smiled a little themselves, and hurried past the unseen ruin of Jimmy Cullum to see what was so funny.
6
They were still laughing as Bill and Eddie came into the clearing, sweating under their load of lumber. Even Eddie, usually as pale as cheese, had some color in his face. They dropped the new boards on the almost depleted supply-pile. Ben climbed out of the hole to inspect them.
“Good deal!” he said. “Wow! Great!”
Bill collapsed to the ground. “Can I h-have my heart a-a-attack now or do I h-have to wuh-wait until luh-hater? ”
“Have it later, ” Ben said absently. He had brought a few tools of his own down to the Barrens and was now going over the new boards carefully, pounding out nails and removing screws. He tossed one aside because it
was splintered. Rapping on another returned a dull punky sound in at least three places, and he also tossed that one aside. Eddie sat on a pile of dirt, watching him. He took a honk on his aspirator as Ben pulled a rusty nail
from a board with the claw end of his hammer. The nail squealed like some small unpleasant animal that had been stepped on and didn’t like it.
“You can get tetanus if you cut yourself on a rusty nail, ” Eddie informed Ben.
“Yeah? ” Richie said. “What’s titnuss? Sounds like a woman’s disease. ” “You’re a bird, ” Eddie said. “It’s tetanus, not titnuss, and it means
lockjaw. There’s these special microbes that grow in rust, see, and if you cut yourself they can get inside your body and, um, fuck up your nerves. ”
Eddie went an even darker red and took another fast honk on his aspirator. “Lockjaw, Jesus, ” Richie said, impressed. “That sounds mean. ”
“You bet. First your jaw locks up so tight you can’t open your mouth, not even to eat. They have to cut a hole in your cheek and feed you liquids through a tube. ”
“Oh man, ” Mike said, standing up in the hole. His eyes were wide, the corneas very white in his brown face. “For sure? ”
“My mom told me, ” Eddie said. “Then your throat locks up and you can’t eat anymore and you starve to death. ”
They contemplated this horror in silence. “There’s no cure, ” Eddie amplified.
More silence.
“So, ” Eddie said briskly, “I always watch out for rusty nails and shit like that. I had to have a tetanus shot once and it really hurt. ”
“So why’d you go to the dump with Bill and bring all this crap back? ” Richie asked.
Eddie glanced briefly at Bill, who was looking into the clubhouse, and
there was all the love and hero-worship in that gaze needed to answer such a question but Eddie said softly, “Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That’s the first important thing I ever found out I didn’t find out from my mother. ”
A further silence, not quite uncomfortable, followed. Then Ben went back to pounding out rusty nails, and after awhile Mike Hanlon joined him.
Richie’s transistor, robbed of its voice (at least until Richie’s allowance came in or he found a lawn to mow), swung from its low branch in a mild
breeze. Bill had time to reflect upon how odd all this was, how odd and how perfect, that they should all be here this summer. There were kids he knew visiting relatives. Kids he knew who were off on vacations at Disneyland in
California or on Cape Cod or, in the case of one chum, an unimaginably distant-sounding place with the queer but somehow evocative name of Gstaad. There were kids at church camp, kids at Scout camp, kids at rich- kid camps where you could learn to swim and play golf, camps where you learned to say “Hey, good one!” instead of
“Fuck you!” when your opponent got a killer serve past you at tennis; kids whose parents had simply taken them AWAY. Bill could understand that. He knew some kids who wanted to go AWAY, frightened by the boogeyman stalking Derry this summer, but suspected there were more
parents frightened by that boogeyman. People who had planned to take their vacations at home suddenly decided to go AWAY (Gstaad? was that in Sweden? Argentina? Spain? )
instead. It was a little like the polio scare of 1956, when four kids who went swimming in the O’Brian Memorial Pool had gotten the disease.
Grownups—a word absolutely synonymous in Bill’s mind with mothers and fathers—had decided then, as now, that AWAY was better. Safer. Anyone
able to clear out had cleared. Bill understood AWAY, and he could muse over a word of such fabulous wonder as Gstaad, but wonder was cold comfort compared with desire; Gstaad was AWAY; Derry was desire.
And none of us have gone AWAY, he thought, watching as Ben and Mike pounded used nails out of used boards, as Eddie strolled off into the bushes to take a whiz (you had to go as soon as you could, in order to avoid seriously straining your bladder, he told Bill once, but you also had to watch out for poison ivy, because who needed a case of that on your pecker). We’re all here in Derry. No camp, no relatives, no vacations, no AWAY. All right here. Present and accounted for.
“There’s a door down there, ” Eddie said, zipping his fly as he came back.
“Hope you shook off, Eds, ” Richie said. “If you don’t shake off each time, you can get cancer. My mom told me so. ”
Eddie looked startled, thinly worried, and then saw Richie’s grin. He withered him (or tried to) with a babies-must-play look and then said, “It
was too big for us to carry. But Bill said if all of us went down we could get it up here. ”
“Of course, you can never shake off completely, ” Richie went on. “You want to know what a wise man once told me, Eds? ”
“No, ” Eddie said, “and I don’t want you to call me Eds anymore, Richie.
I mean, I’m sincere. I don’t call you Dick, as in ‘You got any gum on ya, Dick? , ’ so I don’t see why—”
“This wise man, ” Richie said, “told me this: ‘No matter how much you squirm and dance, the last two drops go in your pants. ’ And that’s why there’s so much cancer in the world, Eddie my love. ”
“The reason there’s so much cancer in the world is because nerds like you and Beverly Marsh smoke cigarettes, ” Eddie said.
“Beverly is not a nerd, ” Ben said in a forbidding voice. “You just watch what you say, Trashmouth. ”
“Beep-beep, you g-guys, ” Bill said absently. “And speaking of B-B- Beverly, she’s pretty struh-struh-strong. She could h-h-help get that duh- door. ”
Ben asked what kind of door it was. “Muh-Muh-hogany, I th-hink. ”
“Somebody threw out a mahogany door? ” Ben asked, surprised but not unbelieving.
“People throw out everything, ” Mike said. “That dump? It kills me to go down there. I mean it kills me. ”
“Yeah, ” Ben agreed. “A lot of that stuff could be fixed up easy. And
there are people in China and South America with nothing. That’s what my
mother says. ”
“There’s people with nothing right here in Maine, Sunny Jim, ” Richie said grimly.
“W-W-What’s th-this? ” Bill asked, noticing the album Mike had brought. Mike told him, saying he would show them the picture of the clown when Stan and Beverly got back with the hinges.
Bill and Richie exchanged a look.
“What’s wrong? ” Mike asked. “Is it what happened in your brother’s room, Bill? ”
“Y-Yeah, ” Bill said, and would say no more.
They took turns working on the hole until Stan and Beverly came back, each with a brown paper bag containing hinges. As Mike talked, Ben sat crosslegged, tailor-fashion, and made glassless windows that would swing open and shut in two of the long boards. Perhaps only Bill noticed how
quickly and easily his fingers moved; how adept and knowing they were, like surgeon’s fingers. Bill admired that.
“Some of these pictures go back a hundred years, my dad said, ” Mike told them, holding the album on his lap. “He gets them at those sales people have in their yards, and at secondhand shops. Sometimes he buys them or
trades other collectors for them. Some of them are stereoscopes—there’s two of them just the same on a long card, and when you look at them through this thing like binoculars, it looks like one picture, only in 3-D. Like House of Wax or The Creature from the Black Lagoon. ”
“Why does he like all that stuff? ” Beverly asked. She was wearing ordinary Levi’s but she had done something amusing to the cuffs, blousing them out with a bright paisley material for the final four inches so that they looked like pants out of some sailor’s whimsy.
“Yeah, ” Eddie said. “Most of the time, Derry’s pretty boring. ”
“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s because he wasn’t born here, ” Mike said diffidently. “It’s like—I don’t know—like it’s all new to him, or like, you know, if you came in during the middle of a movie—”
“Sh-sh-sure, you’d want to see the s-start, ” Bill said.
“Yeah, ” Mike said. “There’s a lot of history lying around in Derry. I kind of like it. And I think some of it has to do with this thing—this It, if you want to call it that. ”
He looked at Bill and Bill nodded, his eyes thoughtful.
“So I was looking through it after the Fourth of July parade because I knew I’d seen that clown before. I knew it. And look. ”
He opened the book, thumbed through it, then handed it to Ben, who was sitting on his right.
“D-D-Don’t t-t-touch the puh-puh-pages!” Bill said, and there was such urgency in his voice that they all jumped. He had fisted the hand he had cut reaching into Georgie’s album, Richie saw. Fisted it into a tight, protective knot.
“Bill’s right, ” Richie said, and that subdued, totally un-Richielike voice was a powerful convincer. “Be careful. It’s like Stan said. If we saw it happen, you guys could see it happen, too. ”
“Feel it, ” Bill added grimly.
The album went from hand to hand, each of them holding the book gingerly, by the edges, as if it were old dynamite sweating big beads of
nitro.
It came back to Mike. He opened it to one of the first pages.
“Daddy says there’s no way to date that one, but it’s probably from the early or mid-seventeen-hundreds, ” Mike said. “He repaired a guy’s
bandsaw for a box of old books and pictures. That was one of them. He says it might be worth forty bucks or even more. ”
The picture was a woodcut, the size of a large postcard. When Bill’s turn came to look at it, he was relieved to see that Mike’s father had the kind of album where the pictures were under a protective plastic sheet. He looked, fascinated, and he thought: There. I’m seeing him—or It. Really seeing.
That’s the face of the enemy.
The picture showed a funny fellow juggling oversized bowling pins in
the middle of a muddy street. There were a few houses on either side of the street, and a few huts that Bill guessed were stores, or trading posts, or whatever they called them back then. It didn’t look like Derry at all, except for the Canal. It was there, neatly cobbled on both sides. In the upper background, Bill could see a team of mules on a towpath, dragging a barge.
There was a group of maybe half a dozen kids gathered around the funny fellow. One of them was wearing a pastoral straw hat. Another had a hoop and a stick to roll it with. Not the sort of stick that would come with a hoop that you bought today in a Woolworth’s; it was a branch from a tree. Bill could see the bare knobs on it where smaller branches had been lopped off with a knife or a hatchet. That baby wasn’t made in Taiwan or Korea, he thought, fascinated by this boy who could have been him if he’d been born four or five generations before.
The funny fellow had a huge grin on his face. He wore no makeup (except to Bill his whole face looked like makeup), but he was bald except for two tufts of hair that stuck up like horns over his ears, and Bill had no trouble recognizing their clown. Two hundred years ago or more, he
thought, and felt a crazy surge of terror, anger, and excitement rush through him. Twenty-seven years later, sitting in the Derry Public Library and remembering his first look into Mike’s father’s album, he realized he had felt the way a hunter might feel, coming upon the first fresh spoor of an old killer tiger. Two hundred years ago . . . that long, and only God knows how much longer. This led him to wonder just how long the spirit of Pennywise
had been here in Derry—but he found that was a thought he did not really want to pursue.
“Gimme, Bill!” Richie was saying, but Bill held the album a moment longer, staring fixedly at the woodcut, sure it would begin to move: the bowling pins (if that’s what they were) which the funny fellow was juggling would rise and fall, rise and fall, the kids would laugh and applaud (except maybe they wouldn’t all laugh and applaud; some of them might scream and run instead), the mule-team pulling the barge would move beyond the
borders of the picture.
It didn’t happen, and he passed the book on to Richie.
When the album came back to Mike he turned some more pages, hunting. “Here, ” he said. “This one is from 1856, four years before Lincoln was elected President. ”
The book went around again. This was a color picture—a sort of cartoon
—which showed a bunch of drunks standing in front of a saloon while a fat politician with muttonchop whiskers declaimed from a board that had been set between two hogsheads. He held a foamy pitcher of beer in one hand.
The board upon which he stood was considerably bowed with his weight.
Some distance off, a group of bonneted women were looking at this show of mingled buffoonery and intemperance with disgust. The caption below the picture read: POLITICS IN DERRY IS THIRSTY WORK, SEZ SENATOR GARNER!
“Daddy says pictures like this were really popular for about twenty years before the Civil War, ” Mike said. “They called them ‘foolcards, ’ and
people used to send them to each other. They were like some of the jokes in
Mad, I guess. ”
“Suh-suh-satire, ” Bill said.
“Yeah, ” Mike said. “But now look down in the corner of this one. ”
The picture was like Mad in another way—it had as many details and
little side-jokes as a big Mort Drucker panel in a Mad magazine movie take- off. There was a grinning fat man pouring a glass of beer down a spotted dog’s throat. There was a woman who had fallen on her prat in a mudpuddle. There were two street urchins slyly sticking sulphur-headed
matches into the soles of a prosperous-looking businessman’s shoes, and a girl swinging from her heels in an elm tree so that her underpants showed. But despite this bewildering intaglio of detail, none of them really needed
Mike to point the clown out. Dressed in a loud checked vest-busting drummer’s suit, he was playing the shell-game with a bunch of drunken loggers. He was winking at a lumberjack who had, to judge by the gape- mouthed look of surprise on his face, just picked the wrong nutshell. The drummer/clown was taking a coin from him.
“Him again, ” Ben said. “What . . . a hundred years later? ” “Just about, ” Mike said. “And here’s one from 1891. ”
It was a clipping from the front page of the Derry News. HUZZAH! the headline proclaimed exuberantly. IRONWORKS OPENS! Just below this: “Town Turns Out for Gala Picnic. ” The picture showed a woodcut of the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Kitchener Ironworks; its style reminded Bill of the Currier and Ives prints his mother had in the dining room, although
this was nowhere near as polished. A fellow tricked out in a morning coat and tophat was holding a large pair of open-jawed scissors above the
Ironworks ribbon while a crowd of perhaps five hundred watched. Off to the left was a clown—their clown-turning a handspring for a group of children. The artist had caught him upside down, turning his smile into a scream.
He passed the book on quickly to Richie.
The next picture was a photograph under which Will Hanlon had written: 1933: Repeal in Derry. Although none of the boys knew much about either the Volstead Act or its repeal, the picture made the salient facts clear. The photo was of Wally’s Spa down in Hell’s Half-Acre. The place was almost literally filled to the rafters with men wearing open-collared white shirts,
straw boaters, lumbermen’s shirts, tee-shirts, banker’s suits. All of them were holding glasses and bottles victoriously aloft. There were two big signs in the window. WELCOME BACK, JOHN BARLEYCORN! one
read. The other said: FREE BEER TONIGHT. The clown, dressed like the biggest dandy you ever saw (white shoes, spats, gangster pants), had his foot on the running board of a Reo auto and was drinking champagne from a lady’s high-heeled shoe.
“1945, ” Mike said.
The Derry News again. The headline: JAPAN SURRENDERS—IT’S OVER! THANK GOD IT’S OVER! A parade was snake-dancing its way along Main Street toward Up-Mile Hill. And there was the clown in the background, wearing his silver suit with the orange buttons, frozen in the
matrix of dots that made up the grainy newsprint photo, seeming to suggest (at least to Bill) that nothing was over, no one had surrendered, nothing was won, nil was still the rule, zilch still the custom; seeming to suggest above all that all was still lost.
Bill felt cold and dry and scared.
Suddenly the dots in the picture disappeared and it began to move. “That’s what—” Mike began.
“L-L-Look, ” Bill said. The word dropped out of his mouth like a partially melted ice-cube. “A-A-All of you luh-look at th-this!”
They crowded around.
“Oh my God, ” Beverly whispered, awed.
“That’s IT!” Richie nearly screamed, pounding Bill on the back in his excitement. He looked around at Eddie’s white, drawn face and Stan Uris’s frozen one. “That’s what we saw in George’s room! That’s exactly what we
—”
“Shhh, ” Ben said. “Listen. ” And, almost sobbing: “You can hear them
—Christ, you can hear them in there. ”
And in the silence that was only broken by the mild stir of the summer breeze, they all realized they could. The band was playing a martial marching tune, made faint and tinny by distance . . . or the passage of time .
. . or whatever it was. The cheering of the crowd was like sounds that might come through on a badly tuned radio station. There were popping noises, also faint, like the muffled sound of snapping fingers.
“Firecrackers, ” Beverly whispered, and rubbed at her eyes with hands that shook. “Those are firecrackers, aren’t they? ”
No one answered. They watched the picture, their eyes eating up their faces.
The parade wiggled its way toward them, but just before the marchers reached the extreme foreground—at the point where it seemed they must march right out of the picture and into a world thirteen years later—they dropped from sight, as if on some kind of unknowable curve. The World War I soldiers first, their faces strangely old under their pie-plate helmets, with their sign which read THE DERRY VFW WELCOMES HOME OUR BRAVE BOYS, then the Boy Scouts, the Kiwanians, the Home Nursing Corps, the Derry Christian Marching Band, then the Derry World War II
vets themselves, with the high-school band behind them. The crowd moved
and shifted. Tickertape and confetti fluttered down from the second- and third-floor windows of the business buildings that lined the streets. The clown pranced along the sidelines, doing splits and cartwheels, miming a sniper, miming a salute. And Bill noticed for the first time that people were turning from him—but not as if they saw him, exactly; it was more as if they felt a draft or smelled something bad.
Only the children really saw him, and they shrank away.
Ben stretched his hand out to the picture, as Bill had done in George’s room.
“Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-NO!” Bill cried.
“I think it’s all right, Bill, ” Ben said. “Look. ” And he laid his hand on the protective plastic over the picture for a moment and then took it back. “But if you stripped off that cover—”
Beverly screamed. The clown had left off its antics when Ben withdrew his hand. It rushed toward them, its paint-bloody mouth gibbering and laughing. Bill winced back but held onto the book all the same, thinking it would drop out of sight as the parade had done, and the marching band, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cadillac convertible carrying Miss Derry of 1945.
But the clown did not disappear along that curve that seemed to define the edge of that old existence. Instead, it leaped with a scary, nimble grace onto a lamppost that stood in the extreme left foreground of the picture. It shinnied up like a monkey on a stick—and suddenly its face was pressed against the tough plastic sheet Will Hanlon had put over each of the pages in his book. Beverly screamed again and this time Eddie joined her,
although his scream was faint and blue-breathless. The plastic bulged out— later they would all agree they saw it. Bill saw the bulb of the clown’s red
nose flatten, the way your nose will flatten when you press it against a windowpane.
“Kill you all!” The clown was laughing and screaming. “Try to stop me and I’ll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can’t stop me! I’m the Gingerbread Man! I’m the Teenage Werewolf!”
And for a moment It was the Teenage Werewolf, the moon-silvered face of the lycanthrope peering out at them from over the collar of the silver suit, white teeth bared.
“Can’t stop me, I’m the leper!”
Now the leper’s face, haunted and peeling, rotting with sores, stared at them with the eyes of the living dead.
“Can’t top me, I’m the mummy!”
The leper’s face aged and ran with sterile cracks. Ancient bandages swam halfway out of its skin and solidified there. Ben turned away, his face as
white as curds, one hand plastered over his neck and ear.
“Can’t stop me, I’m the dead boys!”
“No!” Stan Uris screamed. His eyes bulged above bruised-looking
crescents of skin—shockflesh, Bill thought randomly, and it was a word he would use in a novel twelve years later, with no idea where it had come from, simply taking it, as writers take the right word at the right time, as a simple gift from that outer space
(otherspace)
where the good words come from sometimes.
Stan snatched the album from his hands and slammed it shut. He held it closed with both hands, the tendons standing out along the inner surfaces of his wrists and forearms. He looked around at the others with eyes that were nearly insane. “No, ” he said rapidly. “No, no, no. ”
And suddenly Bill found he was more concerned with Stan’s repeated
denials than with the clown, and he understood that this was exactly the sort of reaction the clown had hoped to provoke, because . . .
Because maybe It’s scared of us . . . really scared for the first time in Its long, long life.
He grabbed Stan and shook him twice, hard, holding onto his shoulders. Stan’s teeth clicked together and he dropped the album. Mike picked it up and put it aside in a hurry, not liking to touch it after what he had seen. But it was still his father’s, and he understood intuitively that his father would never see in it what he had just seen.
“No, ” Stan said softly. “Yes, ” Bill said.
“No, ” Stan said again. “Yes. We a-a-all—” “No. ”
“—a-a-all suh-haw it, Stan, ” Bill said. He looked at the others. “Yes, ” Ben said.
“Yes, ” Richie said.
“Yes, ” Mike said. “Oh my God, yes. ” “Yes, ” Bev said.
“Yes, ” Eddie managed, gasping it out of his rapidly closing throat.
Bill looked at Stan, demanding with his eyes that Stan look back at him. “Duh-don’t let it g-g-get y-you, man, ” Bill said. “Yuh-you suh-saw it, t-t- too. ”
“I didn’t want to!” Stan wailed. Sweat stood out on his brow in an oily sheen.
“But y-y-you duh-duh-did. ”
Stan looked at the others, one by one. He ran his hands through his short hair and fetched up a great, shuddering sigh. His eyes seemed to clear of that lowering madness that had so disturbed Bill.
“Yes, ” he said. “Yes. Okay. Yes. That what you want? Yes. ”
Bill thought: We’re still all together. It didn’t stop us. We can still kill It.
We can still kill It . . . if we’re brave.
Bill looked around at the others and saw in each pair of eyes some measure of Stan’s hysteria. Not quite as bad, but there.
“Y-Y-Yeah, ” he said, and smiled at Stan. After a moment Stan smiled back and some of that horrible shocked look left his face. “That’s what I wuh-wuh-wanted, you weh-weh-wet end. ”
“Beep-beep, Dumbo, ” Stan said, and they all laughed. It was hysterical screaming laughter, but better than no laughter at all, Bill reckoned.
“C-C-Come on, ” he said, because someone had to say something. “Let’s f-f-finish the clubhouse. What do you s-s-say? ”
He saw the gratitude in their eyes and felt a measure of gladness for them
. . . but their gratitude did little to heal his own horror. In fact, there was something in their gratitude which made him want to hate them. Would he never be able to express his own terror, lest the fragile welds that made them into one thing should let go? And even to think such a thing wasn’t really fair, was it? Because in some measure at least he was using them— using his friends, risking their lives—to settle the score for his dead brother.
And was even that the bottom? No, because George was dead, and if
revenge could be exacted at all, Bill suspected it could only be exacted on behalf of the living. And what did that make him? A selfish little shit waving a tin sword and trying to make himself look like King Arthur?
Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up.
His resolve was still strong, but it was a bitter resolve. Bitter.
